Out of the Ashes

It took hundreds of firemen from 31 companies three hours to extinguish the inferno that claimed the 60,000-sq.-ft. Gallery Furniture warehouse, and its owners less than a day to get the business up and running again.

The high-cube warehouse, located along Interstate 45 in Houston, held approximately $15 million in merchandise when the fire broke out on May 21, 2009. Three attached showrooms at the front of the complex sustained water and smoke damage, but were salvageable.

Jim McIngvale, founder and owner of Gallery Furniture, was tending to customers in one of the showrooms at around 8:30 p.m. when he received the call from his warehouse manager. His initial assumption was that it was manageable, “a fire in a dumpster.

“The next thing I knew, firemen were bursting in, telling everyone to get out,” he says. “As we evacuated, I looked behind me toward the warehouse and the flames were jumping up about 150 feet in the air. I knew then that all hell was breaking loose.”

The fire was deliberately set: A disgruntled former employee is awaiting trial on arson charges.
Twenty-one hours after the fire erupted, Gallery Furniture, which generated $100 million a year from that location, was back in business. “Adversity doesn’t teach character,” McIngvale says. “It reveals it.”

Taking swift action
All fires are horrible, but one in a furniture warehouse can be especially so. Foam, cardboard and plastic are “things that burn quickly,” McIngvale says. “It was a miracle that no one was hurt. The heat in that building was 2,000 degrees, and the firemen would come out to the parking lot and collapse.”

There were moments of joy. Firemen were able to rescue three macaws that serve as showroom mascots. Unconscious when brought out, they were revived with oxygen.

Technology, in the form of a back-up server housed at an off-site location, enabled McIngvale to preserve the continuity of the business. Gallery uses furniture business management software from San Diego-based GERS Retail Systems to store critical data — inventory, invoices, payroll, customer information and vendor contacts.

“Thanks to them and the backup people, we never missed a beat in continuity from the aspect of accessing our data,” McIngvale says.

The fire was vanquished by 11:30 p.m. At midnight, McIngvale and wife Linda, determined not to disappoint customers or surrender to pity or defeat, were on the phone with vendors ordering furniture. They went to bed about 3 a.m., only to rise three hours later to continue the resurrection of their business.

Being interviewed on the radio at 7 a.m., McIngvale appealed for help in finding a new warehouse location. A half-hour later, he was filming a TV commercial stressing that while the fire had destroyed the warehouse, a second Gallery Furniture showroom was open for business as usual.

At 3 p.m., Linda, the company’s head of distribution and logistics, found a new location for the warehouse and they promptly signed a lease. At 5 p.m., the first trucks arrived from local vendors, and by the end of the day the Gallery team had packed and delivered about $20,000 of furniture.

When disaster hits so swiftly, it can be hard to believe what is happening. McIngvale recalls the scene as being “surreal. But we determined that night that it was not going to stop us.”